Autumn 2025: How ICAS is helping giant armadillos, bees and recovering addicts

Our charity has worked with Dr Arnaud Desbiez and his team at the Wildlife Conservation Institute (ICAS) in Brazil for over a decade to safeguard threatened giant anteaters, giant armadillos and their rapidly disappearing habitat. This team has made incredible strides in making habitats and roads safer for giant anteaters, and discovered nearly everything that is currently known about giant armadillos.  

Arnaud recently updated us on what’s been happening with the Armadillos and Honey project.  

As part of the Armadillos and Honey project we provide small-scale beekeepers with highly productive queen bees.  

We started to do this about a year ago. We realised that small-scale beekeepers were benefiting from mitigation measures since there were no more losses from giant armadillos, but they were not actually benefiting from their presence. They couldn’t use the giant armadillo-friendly logo on the honey they sell as they most often sell it informally without official sanitary inspection, which is one of the requirements to be able to use the certification and logo on their products.  

To make sure they benefit from coexisting with giant armadillos we started producing high-quality queen bees and giving them to the beekeepers for free. This can help almost double their production.  

There is only one other place in Mato Grosso do Sul that produces queen bees, and that beekeeper is one of our partners. He helped train our team and donated the hives to produce queen bees. This year alone almost 500 queen bees have been donated.

This project has more exciting news about who we produce the queen bees with. We’ve partnered with a drug rehabilitation facility for men that currently houses 67 residents on the premises. It takes a minimum of seven months to go through this voluntary program.  

We now have hives to produce queens in their facility. It takes about two weeks to produce queen bees, and we are currently training two men from the centre in the techniques of beekeeping, as well as queen and honey production.